Compromise in Relationships: Agreed, but Resentment Lingers

In this conversation with Olga Stolyarova, I look at what really lies behind compromises in relationships, family, work and business. Why doesn’t outward agreement always mean that people have truly come to an agreement?

Do you keep giving in to avoid conflict, preserve a relationship or end a difficult conversation, while disagreement, tension and a sense of injustice still remain inside? Where is the line between a healthy agreement and a compromise in which a person gradually abandons their own truth? I also talk about situations in which you can change the way you move forward without violating truth, and about matters on which you must not agree under any circumstances.

What compromise really is

– When is compromise for the good, and when does a person begin to diminish themselves? A person seems to make a compromise because they understand from their side what is going on, yet they feel that the other person in the conversation won’t hear them anyway. And so they compromise — perhaps to preserve harmony in the relationship, to preserve something, to keep the conflict from going any further.

– Let’s look at the very concept of compromise. What does it mean? A compromise is an agreement reached through mutual concessions when interests, needs or points of view clash. It is a way to resolve a conflict or settle disagreements in which each side gives up part of its demands in order to find a solution acceptable to everyone.

This is very important: this term holds an incredible foundation for understanding your question — and it’s a good question. Can you compromise with a pure consciousness at all, or is there always an aftertaste? Judging by what this definition of “compromise” says, there is always an aftertaste, because you always have to concede something you disagree with. The disagreement remains; you simply concede.

It’s one thing when we make such a concession in social relationships — for example, in business or professional relationships. Someone comes and says, “I want five thousand dollars.” They tell him, “No, three.” He says, “How about four and a half?” They tell him, “No, three and a half.” — “Let’s say four.” — “Agreed, four.” There is a certain compromise. And here’s the question: is it a compromise, or, in the end, an agreement between the two sides?

One side seemed to want three, the other five, and in the end they agreed on four. Whether that is agreement or disagreement is a big question, because perhaps four was, on the whole, enough for the person. After all, if a person remains in disagreement, they will go to work every day still convinced that they don’t like it, that they don’t want to live with it, don’t want to be in it. It isn’t their place at all. And there is an enormous, simply incredible number of such people.

It’s a different matter when compromise comes up in real life, where you no longer say, “This is just the social environment, this is work. I agreed to it, and I’ll leave that factor as it is.” When you are told, for example, “You must bow to me every day.” The person replies, “It isn’t normal in a relationship between husband and wife to bow to each other.” — “And I think it’s normal.” And the person compromises and bows every day. Or they have to do certain things that, from the standpoint of their own inner state, they consider unacceptable — for example, harming other people.

Why people constantly live in compromise

The most important thing: if a person lives with the notion of compromise, with the very fact of compromise, life will be very hard in terms of perceiving everything that happens. Very hard.

Unfortunately, society and people — all people — use this compromise in life endlessly, simply every day and everywhere. Constantly. And they somehow define it for themselves: is it an aggressive compromise, or supposedly a kind of going along, an open agreement, an open mind and so on?

I have seen an incredible number of meetings where you discuss something with people and come to an agreement together. Everything seems completely open, everything is detailed, you are already signing documents, everything has been fully spelled out in words — and the other person actually completely disagrees. Perhaps they simply didn’t want to discuss it to the end and weren’t ready to go into a long discussion.

People, for example, often tell me, “It’s impossible to agree on anything with you, because you always win the argument.” That is, the person doesn’t understand how to find a compromise with me, because from the outset their position is that they can’t discuss certain things with reasoned arguments.

The selfish motive behind compromise

And since a person can’t discuss certain things with reasoned arguments, finding a compromise is already hard. The problem is the very fact of disagreement, the very fact of differences and of settling them in a way where each side gives up part of its demands. Which demands are you giving up?

• If you give up excessive demands — for example, you came to ask for a salary you don’t deserve and gave it up — that’s one thing.
• If you give up inhumane demands — you wanted to harm other people, you are told, “Don’t harm them,” and you compromise and don’t harm people — that’s one thing.
• But if you give up demands that life itself carries, that are seething in you, that live in you, that you cannot and do not want to fight, that say: it’s the truth that other people must be loved, other people must be respected — and you give that up, then you will have enormous trouble.

And here an important aspect arises. Your question contained a key construction — a certain selfishness in using the notion of compromise: how can I use compromise as selfishly as possible? That doesn’t mean you want that. Perhaps you read someone’s question in the social environment, or someone asked it in our groups, or somewhere else. But the point is the very fact of it: how can I feel as comfortable as possible in a compromise? There is a problem here.

If you want to feel comfortable in a compromise for your own sake, you will go on wanting only for yourself. And if you want only for yourself, you can feel comfortable in a compromise only if you’ve won. Imagine: there is one person who wants to take advantage of the other, and the second also wants to take advantage of the other. And they’ve found a certain balance. Will they feel all right? Never.

But if one wants to take advantage of the other and the second doesn’t — he wants to sustain a healthy, normal human environment — then this second person can come to an agreement: remove a certain number of points on his side, a certain number of his own demands. He can say, “All right, let’s do it this way, let’s take a different road,” without violating truth, simply changing the construction of the movement where it has every right to be that way. Buying a bed that isn’t rectangular but round or square. Buying not a huge one but a slightly smaller one. Flying not on this plane but on another. Things that on the whole do no harm to the world and do no harm to truth.

But look: if the other person acts solely from their own selfish motives, if they are interested only in their own side, not interested in the other person, don’t try to understand them, yet still try to reach an agreement based only on themselves rather than on understanding the other person — they will never feel good. Even if they’ve reached an agreement and kept even more of their terms, they still won’t feel good.

Take an enormous number of people: they live in incredible dissatisfaction. A person says, “My salary is small.” They start earning more — and another dissatisfaction appears, or they still say their earnings are bad or that people are bad. A person keeps finding certain problems. It doesn’t matter what they agreed on, it doesn’t matter what the other side does.

An enormous number of families come to me — or individual people within families — and partners with conflicts in business or something else. I often tell people, “Accept the other point of view. It won’t change anything in your own goal.”

Imagine: a person’s goal is to make money in a business, and the other person asks for something. For example, he thinks the office walls should be red. The first one doesn’t like that. I say, “Just agree with his walls. Does it affect your profit? It doesn’t. Just agree.” The person agrees to red walls. A week later he comes again — and he has a new dissatisfaction with his partner. He finds something else.

I have had businesses in partnership where the partners were simply destroyers of everything. And later, when our businesses parted ways, I watched: they went into other partnerships or talked about their lives — and stayed in exactly the same negativity. About our partnership they said they woke up every morning and couldn’t breathe, eat or sleep. Time passed — and in exactly the same way they couldn’t breathe, eat or sleep.

The most important thing is what you are saying and where you see the cause. Why do you really have trouble breathing? Why do you really sleep badly? What is actually causing it? What truly lies behind your complaint against someone?

Compromising with yourself: where the illusion lies

And all of this comes down to a very simple story. We say that compromise is an agreement reached through mutual concessions. And here a very interesting question arises. Olya, you will often notice that a person reaches a compromise without anyone else taking part. He says, “I made a compromise.” So who did he compromise with? With himself? Or did he come to an agreement with a tree? He says, “I made a compromise and started getting up not at six in the morning but at seven.” And who did you negotiate with?

If you read the definition once more, compromise is an agreement through mutual concessions when interests clash. So where did the interests clash? Whose interests clashed? Then don’t take a job where you have to arrive by eight or seven in the morning, so you don’t slip into a compromise with yourself. If a job requires that much work, that’s a requirement of that job. Simply don’t take it.

Most people on the planet live in endless compromise — with themselves, of course. And that is an illusion, the work of the endless ego-computer: a person’s ego, the work of their personality, their endless reasoning about who is right and who is to blame. A failure to acknowledge yourself — who you really are, what you really want.

Negativity as a conversation with yourself

I have several YouTube channels — three channels — and people leave comments. This morning I was reading the comments under one video, and someone had again written something negative. Although I can’t say there is a huge amount of negativity on my channels. And negativity is a positive story anyway: it means your channel has reached a wide audience. After all, an audience that loves you doesn’t leave negativity.

And people write negativity. Today I once again looked at this energy. What is this energy? An endless energy of throwing out some negativity: how you look, how you speak, what your voice is like, what topic you’re discussing — just to argue. What do you want to show by this? Why are you doing it?

So this reasoning is really a person’s reasoning with themselves. I won’t be revealing any secret: everyone who writes comments on big channels, especially negative ones, is writing to themselves. Who needs these comments? Do you really think that an author with millions of subscribers — not me, but there are people who get a huge amount of negativity — reads your comments or finds them interesting? People write negativity, and that’s that. The author knows negativity exists. They may joke about it, or they may not. And often an editorial team deals with such negativity anyway.

A person is really colliding with themselves; they are doing this to themselves. It’s all in their own thoughts. And they express it as a comment, or further on as a protest against another person.

And when the other person — in the family, in a partnership, a father, a son, friends, parents, it doesn’t matter who — simply agrees with them, accepts their point of view, reacts to it calmly and says, “Yes, fine, let’s do it that way,” it isn’t enough for them. Because there is a very important story behind it.

When you have your own personal ego motive, you don’t think about the other person but want to resolve your own issue — you personally want to resolve it. And you haven’t told the other person about it. Imagine: you and I are interacting and trying to find a compromise in something. But I’m interested in something of my own — for example, I want you to recognize me endlessly. The only way to resolve this issue for myself is if I tell you, “Listen, Olya, I want you to recognize me endlessly.”

And you might even say, “No problem at all, Alexander, I’ll recognize you endlessly. I’ll try to do it, I’ll meditate on it, I’ll go to church and light candles for it, I’ll read mantras and texts, do certain exercises, go to certain courses — I’ll do it.” Notice: will that calm me down? Will I believe it or not? Most likely, I still won’t believe it. Even if you start doing it, I won’t work through this task. Why? Because I want to satisfy a need that actually has nothing to do with your praise. And by praising me you can’t resolve this need of mine — it’s impossible to find it there.

In the same way, people try to resolve it through money: they earn more and more or spend more and more and try to find something for themselves. Or through affairs — they cheat more and more, trying to find something, to compensate for something. But it isn’t compensated, because the cause lies somewhere else entirely.

And so it turns out that compromise in this case — where a person sees it and thinks they’ve made a compromise — is an opportunity to find the very points in you that are the problem. To see these things, to see where you are really going too far, or to try to hear the other side. And on what plane is the other side, anyway?

I have a great deal of social life, various business projects, social projects, and I have to negotiate a lot. From time to time I negotiate purely within social terms: I see right away that on the other side is a person who manipulates, who is interested only in themselves. But I need to come to an agreement with them. I need to be with them, live or coexist, sign documents, make money or do some project. And if I need to do something with them, I will proceed from a very clear understanding that this person doesn’t hear me at all. And if they don’t hear me, then at the very least I need to stop repeating something to a wall. Simply stop. It’s pointless. Why do it, even if I want to achieve something?

Even if you want to remain in these selfish motives, the only thing you have the opportunity to do is to figure out what the other person will actually do.

That’s why there are very skilled manipulators: incredible manipulator-politicians, incredible manipulator-businesspeople who know what to say to an audience, what to say to people at the right moment. Real manipulators, pure ones, of a high level. If you look closely, there aren’t that many such people in the world. People can’t get past their own selfish barrier: they are spraying spit in all directions, they simply can’t stop. And sometimes a person simply needs to stop, even for the sake of their own selfish motives.

I have told some people, “In this business all you had to do was praise me every day and say how good I am. I would have given you all the money, but you can’t.” I say, “That won’t work now. But you could have done it, you could have used it.” If you know another person’s damage, you can use it. But to know another person’s damage, you have to take a look at them.

I suggest that everyone take a look — not in order to take advantage of the other person, but in order to try to truly hear them.

Especially if you are living for real. And living for real means living for the long term and living right now at the same time. When you live for real, there is no time limit. That is the only possibility there is. You might say, “That’s for playing the long game.” Call it what you like, but for me it is simply real life. It isn’t a game, it’s life. A game is still a kind of manipulation, a fairy tale, a fantasy. But this is the only possibility. Then you can truly see various patterns.

Because otherwise you will live in endless deception: deception in communication with other people, with your children, with your loved ones, at work — and, most importantly, deception with yourself. Even selfishly, that is the most important thing. You will be deceiving yourself all the time.

What should replace compromise. On balance in relationships

I sit and watch over long periods of time — given that for years I have been engaged in constantly registering the actions of other people and my own, twenty-four seven, all the time. Of course, there are times when I’m asleep or briefly distracted. And I watch people tossing about. People shout, “We hate red! Alexander, we will never in our lives listen to you.” Time passes — people come running and ask for help. Then again they spit in their own face or shout, “We still hate red, and now we hate black too.” And what do you love? “Green.” Then time passes again, and now it’s red, and black, and green, and every muddy color in between — and the problem is now something else. It is endless tossing about. People can’t resolve simple things between themselves, simple conflicts, simple questions.

Because where you understand that you are giving something up, you aren’t making a compromise — you simply understand that this is the natural, real movement of life. It isn’t a compromise. It happened because it had to happen — maybe for karmic reasons, maybe for psychophysical ones; I made an error in terms of intellect; it happened through a moment of fate, through planetary influence, ancestral influence, the influence of countries — anything at all. What difference does it make? But it happened. Everything that happened had to happen. And that is not a compromise.

– Honestly, I don’t quite understand. A conflict happens, or some recurring situation in relationships with certain people. For example, a person agrees with another person out of love, out of the intention not to quarrel. But at some point the other person starts reading it as the norm. And the first question is: why does this feeling arise inside — I agreed once, I agreed a second time, I agreed a third time — perhaps a feeling of some injustice: why am I always the one who agrees? What should you switch on inside instead, so that there is none of this, you know, “keeping score”? After all, there is a law of the Universe — the law of balance. And it seems to me — maybe I’m wrong — that some balance should still be kept in relationships with people. If you constantly agree with a person even though inside you disagree, and you do it to preserve the relationship, while the other person still doesn’t hear you, some inner balance is still being disturbed.

– You don’t know what kind of balance. That is the whole problem: you think about balance but don’t understand what balance is. You can’t calculate it. Just as people pay the same amount of money for an education. It’s one thing when people pay the same amount for coffee. But imagine people paying the same amount for some course. Where is the balance if one person, after this course, gets a job and earns a hundred thousand dollars a year, while the second, because of this course, loses their current job, makes a wrong decision, their life is disrupted, and then they lose their wife, their family and everything else? Where is the balance?

You look at balance locally. You think that if you have agreed fifty times, the other person should start agreeing too. But with your fifty agreements you may not even have come close to balance with that person, or to the balance of the world.

What’s more, you won’t come close. If you stand on your knees for four hours every day begging the Universe for every forgiveness there is, asking for everything, you will have performed some actions, but you won’t resolve your karma. Go ahead and kneel — you will see that you won’t resolve it. Otherwise it would be a simple action, the most elementary one. That is exactly why many people do it: they think it’s the simplest action. By all logic, it should be the simplest action.

You take yourself, fence yourself off from social contacts, from various opportunities, and go into a mode of pure service to people. But people don’t pass into the light at that moment, because there is still a whole huge tangle there. There is a great deal of everything, a great many complex causes and effects. The question isn’t these acts of going along.

What’s more, when you say, “I yield to a person out of compromise, I agree with them,” you aren’t working anything off. Nothing.

But if you look at a person and say, “All right, I’ll agree with you here, I’ll make a concession to you so that…” — that is called karmic management, and you will get a hammer blow back. After all, you didn’t do it from a pure consciousness. What’s more, who told you that you have to agree with everything, even where the person is wrong?

There are things you must never agree to, under any circumstances. Let them jump, run, fall, stand — anything at all, and you don’t agree to it. You say, “I will not agree to this.”

And here a person faces a very simple choice. There is no such choice, but it is very simple. You have to die tomorrow — or steal sour cream from a store today. Will you steal the sour cream or die? That’s all. What will a person choose? Will you hit another person — or are you ready to die tomorrow? Or will you hit them after all? Olya, what would most people in the world do today?

– The first.

– Unfortunately, they would hit the other person. Of course, you can call my example downright stupid, unreasonable or abnormal: what kind of examples are these, how can anyone give them. But I give this example simply to show how unreasonable the whole situation is, how unreasonable the systems at work are.

How to learn to hear

– So it turns out you always need to at least hold inside yourself…

– I think, Olya, there is no need to draw a simple conclusion here. Today I read a comment under one of the videos on my channel. Someone took my video and made a summary of it with artificial intelligence — you can see that very clearly from the structure of the text, the arrangement of the words and everything else. And at the end they wrote, “In one sentence, it sounds like this.” It doesn’t sound like that.

As one young woman wrote in a review yesterday, “When I listen to you, each time I hear something different for myself in the very same words.” It’s important for people to understand this. What do you want? To get some phrase, or to begin hearing different things? That’s why, Olya, there is no single phrase. However much you want to find it — you always want to find one phrase, to draw a general conclusion, to pin it down for your brain.

The information I’m sharing now is not given in order to be formulated. It isn’t given to anyone watching this video so that they can formulate it for themselves in one sentence and walk away with an understanding. I have no goal here for a person to walk away with an understanding. That is pointless. An understanding of what? Of life? What are we discussing? An understanding of what?

You can walk away with the understanding that if I think I’ve made a compromise, then very often I have gone into even bigger ego motives, once again didn’t listen to the other person and was interested only in myself. And if I have gone into such things, why not look at it and start working on these tasks, on these clear things? That’s all.

The desire to prove you understood everything — a limit on perception

– That’s what I wanted to say.

– Of course, of course. Olya, by the way, a separate comment for you. The very fact that you say this is what you wanted to say shows that you aren’t hearing it. In such a discussion, a person who is taking in the material will never sum up at the end, out of their own motive, “I understood everything” — not if they truly understood. Remember this, Olya.

If you have an impulse to assert yourself and show me — and yourself — that you understood everything, it shows that you have a problem perceiving the material at hand.

Understand, it can’t be otherwise. A person will tell themselves, “You’re simply wrong. I wanted to show you that.” But you will never come to the understanding that the other person is wrong if they are simply telling you something, and you were interested in it and asked them about it yourself. That is the whole point.

After all, it isn’t as if a person came to take an exam with you and you are grading them: “You’re wrong, I’ll give you a slightly different grade. You conducted the conversation incorrectly, you heard me incorrectly.” That’s another matter. I’m not taking an exam. You ask me a question — I talk about it. And in the same way, on the other side there are people who will say, “How so? I formulated it and did it.” That’s the whole thing: I’m not taking an exam for these people.

And this isn’t my self-confidence, nor some harsh view or harsh message of mine. Not at all — it’s the truth. Especially if a person has watched up to this point, has managed to get through such a stretch. It is the real truth. That’s the whole point: if such a spark arises in you, you simply need to notice it.

I tell a great many people, “If you’re watching and the author starts making you feel nauseous, write down a reflection for yourself. But if the author doesn’t ask for such a reflection, don’t write it to them.” I do ask. I keep saying, “Write a reflection, only honestly and sincerely, and not again from a position of complaint.”

It’s all very clear. A person writes, “You know, Alexander, I was watching you and felt irritation; I’ll work on that.” That is one position, a clean one. Another position: “Alexander, I was watching you and felt irritation, which was to be expected.” Positions vary, and you can always understand whose side you are on. But it is your side, not mine. It is your conversation with yourself.

Do you understand what this is about? This channel is devoted, among other things, to personal development — in general, in social life, everywhere, including at work. I give a great many examples of interaction with other people. And it’s important for you to hear this: these examples give you the opportunity to move forward incredibly strongly in society, because you immediately see who is on whose side and who is playing what game.

Yesterday I led a meeting, and there were quite a lot of people there. And you sit there, and it’s very interesting. Sometimes I throw in some information: raise my voice, say something calmly, praise someone, do something else — and watch how people react. And you immediately see all the games: someone defends themselves negatively, someone defends themselves to protect themselves in front of other people, someone, on the contrary, stays silent, someone plays their own game, someone praises. You see the field of these people — what they are doing, what they are acting out.

If at that moment you think only about yourself, you won’t see anything of what is happening there. And afterwards you won’t be able to understand properly how you — as a manager, or even as an employee if you are in a subordinate role — should go on interacting with all these people. How can you sense this if you don’t truly pay attention to other people, don’t see their chain ahead: what they are occupied with, what they are doing, why this or that person changed their pattern of behavior? Why is this happening?

There is always reasoning to be done here — in any situation, including conflicts and compromises. We hear in the world: why did this country make this compromise? Strange. Why did this newspaper write about it? Why did those people write about it? Why did they take this action? Why did people say this? What are their interests? What are their motives? This gives you the opportunity to understand life very seriously.

Someone will say, “I don’t want to go that broad.” My wife’s mother came to visit us; we were walking together and discussing some political questions. She says, “I don’t really watch any of that.” And there is no need to watch it. There are things you don’t need to immerse yourself in if they don’t concern you and aren’t connected with you — provided you aren’t running away from them. Sometimes a person doesn’t watch because they are running away — out of fear, out of dread. Mom told me, “My neighbor says: ‘I haven’t watched television for fifteen years. Every time I watch the news, my blood pressure goes up threefold and I need to call an ambulance. So I realized: I won’t watch television.’”

Not doing something for the sake of your health is another matter. A person simply needs to understand the reason why they do something or don’t do something. Either a person doesn’t get involved because it really doesn’t concern them, but then they get truly involved elsewhere. Or they don’t get involved anywhere and get involved only where they have a selfish interest.

What matters is where a person has become involved: where their selfish interests lie, or where life truly is. You need to figure this out, look at it, give it attention, including for the sake of other people. Without this, it’s impossible to live.

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